Given a path, test if its application

Question

I am making a little .desktop creator thing, where users provide a path. Path can be a link application or directory. Is there any direct way to test if is app? I can do test if its a directory.

Thanks

Answer 1

See man bash, and you can do things like:

   -a file
          True if file exists.
   -d file
          True if file exists and is a directory.
   -e file
          True if file exists.
   -f file
          True if file exists and is a regular file.
   -u file
          True if file exists and its set-user-id bit is set.
   -x file
          True if file exists and is executable.
    -L file
          True if file exists and is a symbolic link.

and many, many more.

You can also look "inside" the file with the file command (see man file) to gain more information.

Rather than parsing the output of ls (which always leads to eventual confusion), one should use /usr/bin/stat -c "%a %n" filename:

$ stat -c "%a %n" .bashrc
700 .bashrc

Answer 2

Test if it's an application? You can check to see if it's executable:

ls -l {path} | cut -d " " -f 1 | grep -c x

Will return 0 if not executable, or a positive integer if executable.